High-Throughput Production of High-Quality Graphene by Exfoliation of Expanded Graphite in Simple Liquid Benzene Derivatives

Graphene, a perfect one-atomic thick two-dimensional lattice carbon allotrope, has drawn extensive attention of scientific communities since it was found several years ago, for its excellent mechanical characteristics, unique electrical properties and remarkable optical properties. However, one of the biggest obstacles to graphene research and applications is to obtain single-layer graphene in large quantity. Here, we reported a solvent-exfoliation method to massively produce high quality graphene. We showed that the expanded graphite can be effectively dispersed and exfoliated in several common benzene derivatives including chlorobenzene, benzyl chloride, o-dichlorobenzene and nitrobenzene, to produce high-quality graphene sheets, with a yield of about 3.9%. The obtained thin graphene nanosheets have been characterized by TEM, SEM and Raman spectroscopy.